Nobel Peace Prize Winner Obama Leaves a Legacy of War
As a young state senator in 2002, Obama gave an antiwar rally speech railing against the “dumb,” “rash” rush to war in Iraq. As a presidential candidate five years later, he promised to “turn the page on the imperial presidency” and usher in “a new dawn of peace.” In a speech to US troops last month, he denounced the “false promise” that “we can eliminate terrorism by dropping more bombs,” and piously proclaimed that “democracies should not operate in a state of permanently authorized war.”
And yet, 2008’s “peace candidate” has launched two undeclared wars (in Libya and against ISIS), ordered 10 times as many drone strikes as George W. Bush — including the remote-control execution of an American citizen, and, this summer, bombed six different countries just over Labor Day weekend.
By the time Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009, he’d already launched more drone strikes than “war president” Bush managed during his two terms.
It is Obama who is largely responsible for warping the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force—passed three days after 9/11 to target Al Qaeda and the Taliban—into an enabling act for endless war, anywhere in the world.
Where Bush secured congressional authorization for the two major wars he fought, Obama made perpetual warfare the new normal, and the president the ultimate “decider” in matters of war and peace.
Alas, political tribalism warps people’s perceptions of basic reality, convincing partisans they’re entitled to their own facts.
Even during the heyday of resistance to the Vietnam War, the criticism became more intense after Republican Richard Nixon took over the White House than it had been under Democrat Lyndon Johnson. There was far more criticism of Republican George H.W. Bush’s Persian Gulf War than there was of Democrat Bill Clinton’s wars in Bosnia and Kosovo (a distressing number of prominent liberals even found reasons to praise Clinton’s military crusades in the Balkans).
Left-wing groups mounted a fairly serious effort to thwart Republican Bush’s invasion of Iraq. But when Democrat Obama escalated U.S. military involvement in Afghanistan and led a NATO assault to remove Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi from power, the reaction was very different. Except for a few hard-left organizations, the sounds coming from the usual supposed anti-war liberal quarters were those of crickets. Likewise, there has been little push-back to Obama’s gradual return of the U.S. military presence in Iraq or the entanglement of the U.S. military in Syria.
With Trump’s inauguration near, Obama has described the transfer of presidential power as ”a relay race” where he’ll pass the baton to his successor. In private, he’s occasionally used a more ominous metaphor: leaving “a loaded weapon” behind for the next president.
And, now, Obama will pass that weapon on to Donald J. Trump, a man he’s flatly declared “unfit” for the office — someone who can’t be trusted with a Twitter account, let alone the nuclear launch codes.
